How To Get Started: Robert Pinsky + John Wesley Harding

Thursday, December 13, 2012

Ticket Information

$30; Members $25; Under 30 $15

Additional Images

Time

7:30 PM

Presented By

Symphony Space

Event Type

Performances

Genre

Classical/Contemporary

Description

John Cage's centenary is celebrated in this rare performance of Cage's 1989 How To Get Started-a collaborative experiment exploring improvisation and the origin of ideas. The performers bring ten ideas on notecards, choose them in random order, and extemporize on each one as they are recorded and played back in real time, creating a multi-layered "thought performance." The result is transformative, and provides a rare look into the creative mind.

In remounting this 'happening,' some of today's most fertile and creative minds from across the arts perform their own realizations. Each of the three evenings pairs a writer and musician who know each other, and, in the case of the Shawns, are brothers. What will be revealed by each "performer," and the conversation between pairs on each evening will be a mystery solved in the moment. Be part of this spontaneous performance experience. The series is presented in collaboration with The Threepenny Review, the Slought Foundation and the John Cage Trust.

Former Poet Laureate, currently poetry editor at Slate, poet, essayist, literary critic, translator, and jazz aficionado Robert Pinsky is an artist-intellectual open to new experience. He is well-matched by his partner for this performance of How to Get Started, the pop-folk singer-songwriter John Wesley Harding, a.k.a the novelist Wesley Stace, author of Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer. Wendy Lesser, editor of The Threepenny Review, moderates the post-performance conversation.

"In jazz, as in poetry there is always that play between what's regular and what's wild. That has always appealed to me." -Robert Pinsky

About Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer: "Wesley Stace's tale of music and murder is a baroque intellectual thriller, wittily erudite and psychologically acute." -Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise